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THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
AND THE NEW DAY 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NBW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

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TORONTO 



THE 

CHRISTIAN FAITH 

AND THE 

NEW DAY 



BY 
CLELAND BOYD McAFEE 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1920 

All rights reserved 



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COPYBIGHT. 1920, 
BT THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1920. 



APR -I i920 



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PREFACE 

This is not a reconstruction of theology but a 
plea for that work and some suggestion of a few 
typical points where it is needed and opportune. A 
teacher of theology shrinks a bit when it is said that 
the day for theology is over; he is apt to think in- 
stead that the day has just come for vital religion 
which will mean a vital theology. But such a 
teacher knows well that theology can be devitalized 
by mistaking its own expressions for the truth it is 
trying to express. Visitors to theological seminaries 
often tell young men they are not to preach their 
theology, whereas in any sound way of speaking it 
is the only thing they are to preach. Yet the most 
deadly thing that could be preached is a theology 
that does not carry the message of religion for its 
own day. 

The appeal herein is not to technical theologians 
but to working ministers and thoughtful laymen 
who, after all, build and use the theology that is 
living and who sometimes fear to see it change. 
The great days just passed have given many of us a 
renewed assurance that Christianity is more vital 
and forceful than it has been for many a long day. 
Its vitality may well claim the right to phrase itself 
anew — which means to reconstruct theology at 
any point where it may need reconstructing. Dr. 



Preface 

Garvie's '* informed and responsible " theologians, 
in and out of the pulpit, have felt the need and joy 
of it for some time. 

Much of the material was first used in an address 
at the opening of the Seminary year just after the 
war. 

Cleland Boyd McAfee. 

McCormick Theological Seminary, 
October, 1919. 



1 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I The Call to Reconstruction . . i 

II The Christian Theology of God . 15 

III The Christian Theology of Salva- 

tion 31 

IV The Church 46 

V A Concluding Word . . . . . 71 



-/ 



THE CHRISTIAN FAITH AND 
THE NEW DAY 

I 

THE CALL TO RECONSTRUCTION 

It is a commonplace almost past saying that the 
world has been living through times of upheaval. 
The hour of settling has hardly yet appeared, but 
it is essential that as rapidly as possible the war be 
put into the background of our thinking. It has 
occupied the foreground in the thought of the world 
for five years, and can never again leave the field 
of vision of thoughtful men of this generation. It 
would be a fatal mistake, however, if we should 
allow it to continue to occupy the focus of our 
consciousness. Wars do not settle the future; they 
merely open the way for such settlements as the 
men who follow them may care to make. God 
forgive us if we should ever fail to see life against 
the background of this terrific experience! But it 
is life that we must see after all. It is the present 
day task, the present-day demand, that must con- 
cern us primarily. Now that the war is over, we 
are fronted at once with the life that we have to 
live. It is as when men return from the burial of 
their dead and life must be taken up again — life 



2 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

which never loses sense of that journey to the grave 
which is in the past. 

The new day upon which we enter is not the 
gift of the war alone. Before the war began or 
was even anticipated, at least two great movements 
were on which made for a new day. 

I. The first of these was in the economic and 
social field where tremendous changes were im- 
pending. Recent labor disturbances were not born 
of the war. They were only sharpened by it. 
Race riots have been made keener by conditions 
growing out of the war, but something of the sort 
would have come even if the world war had never 
occurred and would probably have come before this 
time if the war had not held it back. The gospel 
of Christ had been discovered some years ago to be 
a disturbing element where unequal conditions exist 
among men. Injustices do not fit into its scheme. 
The crumbs of Dives are really not enough for 
Lazarus and there is a feeling that something ought 
to be done about the remote relation between the 
two men. Some years ago we said easily: 

" The rich man in his castle, 
The poor man at his gate, 
God made them high or lowly, 
And ordered their estate." 

We cannot any longer say that with so much as- 
surance. We are not sure that there were not 
some influences rather lower than God that might 
have arranged both castle and gate, and that if 
His ordering were considered there might not be 
quite such a difference in their estates. 



The Call to Reconstruction 3 

The world was growing so much smaller that 
races were thrown together and their differences 
had to be either adjusted or suppressed in some way. 
In short, a social gospel was discovered in the heart 
of the Christian faith. Dr. Rauschenbusch had 
prepared his little book called A Theology for the 
Social Gospel (1917), which never seemed to him 
a completed work but was his witness to the fact 
that a gospel has to have a theology and that as new 
phases of religion emerge, they must be rationalized 
into a system. 

2. But beside these economic and social changes, 
there was also an upheaval of thought that was 
promising a new day. It took two lines. One 
was a reaction against the day when natural science 
had been so fascinating as to take the place of every 
other study. In that day the spiritual forces had 
been analyzed away and explained on purely nat- 
ural grounds. One physicist ironically phrased it 
this way: "All nature reduces itself to matter, 
all matter to electrons, all electrons to ether, and 
all ether to an hypothesis.** Nothing so vital and 
so inherently dogmatic as religion could be com- 
fortable with that view and we were at the beginning 
of a new spiritual accent in the very field of natural 
science. A good many had come to agree with Dr. 
McConnell that " Darwin and the martyrs of nat- 
ural science have done more to make the word of 
Christ intelligible than have Augustine and the 
theologians," and had observed with him that " it 
is little less than marvelous the way in which the 
words of Jesus fit in with the forms of thought which 
are to-day current. They are life, generation, sur- 



4 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

vival of the fit, perishing of the unfit, tree and 
fruit, multiplication by cell growth as yeast, opera- 
tion by chemical contact as salt, dying of the lonely 
seed to produce much fruit, imposition of a higher 
form of life upon a lower by being born from 
above, grafting a new scion upon a wild stock, the 
phenomenon of plant growth from the seed through 
the blade, the ear, and the mature grain, and 
finally the attainment of an individual life which 
has an eternal quality." {Evolution of Immor- 
tality, 130.) And whether it was by reaction 
against materialistic extremes or accommodation to 
scientific suggestions, the effect of this phase of 
thought was already becoming noticeable in the 
field of religion. It was challenging certain ac- 
cepted views which had been easily held, specially 
with reference to the relation of God to his world 
and of the human soul to that same world. If the 
war had not come this would have had to be faced 
exactly as it has now to be faced. When Father 
Tyrrell was asked what he meant by a modernist, 
he replied, *^ By a modernist I mean a Christian 
man of any sort who believes in the possibility of 
a synthesis between the essential truth of his 
religion and the essential truth of modernity." At 
the root of it that either begs the whole question or 
lets us out into a truism. The synthesis of two 
" essential truths " was not open to debate among 
thoughtful men as soon as they realized that they 
lived in a rational universe at all, but some men were 
denying the truth of religion and some the truth of 
modernity, while a growing class was working 
toward the synthesis with courage and hope. 



The Call to Reconstruction 



5 



The other line of this upheaval in thought really 
led to the war itself. Autocracy and democracy 
rest upon what people think. They are ways of 
conceiving human relationships. The struggle be- 
tween them was coming inevitably. Men were 
dreaming the dream of democracy in a world where 
autocracy and a halting unsuccessful democracy were 
the hard and cold facts. In presence of the failings 
of our own land and Great Britain sapient people 
were sneering at our pretensions to democracy. 
They declared things were better done under a wise 
autocracy, so well done indeed that autocracy cannot 
be very bad. We have those sneers now and we had 
them before the war. And present facts fully 
justify them. It is dreams, ideals, visions, that 
counterbalance them. There are Gradgrinds who 
want only facts, but God^s program for the race 
belongs to young men who see visions and old men 
who dream dreams. There were many such before 
the war; their number is increased to-day. The 
two ideas have clashed on the field of battle and 
democracy has dictated the terms of peace. No 
one shows peculiar wisdom in seeing that the terms 
are faulty and at points undemocratic, but the 
discussion of this present time reveals the old align- 
ment, part facing a divided world, nations standing 
each for itself, each claiming autocratic power so 
far as other nations are concerned; part facing a 
united world, nations standing for each other, 
entering a world democracy. For one part, the 
war might never have been ; for the other part, the 
war becomes a great and solemn obligation. 

But it was impossible that a religion which lay 



6 The Christian Faith and the "New Day 

at the heart of this democratic movement should 
itself escape the influence of the movement. The- 
ology was already being challenged to be more 
democratic, to interpret the gospel in terms of 
democracy, to resurvey its autocratic thought of 
God, of the church, even of the Bible. The war 
merely sharpened the challenge, did not create it. 

3. But of course the war itself was another up- 
heaval. Already it bids fair to prove a natural 
incident in history, the emergence of volcanic forces 
that had been gathering for decades. Dr. G. Stanley 
Hall {Adolescence) declared that careful study of 
a frog's muscles made him realize that the universe 
is "' lawful to the core.'' There are even higher 
forms of investigation that would lead to that same 
conclusion. We are not compelled to be kicked 
into it by a frog. The war was not lightning out 
of a clear sky. It was lightning out of heavy-laden 
electric currents which had been gathering for 
decades and whose crash of explosion was as sure 
as the lawful universe itself. But that we are 
able to see only after careful scrutiny. At the 
first it seemed to destroy all values. Even now we 
find that there must be new evaluations made and 
some things that were foremost in our thinking must 
take secondary place or be omitted altogether. 

The upshot of all this is that there is no field 
of human interest that does not need to be resur- 
veyed in this new day: education, government, eco- 
nomics, religion — everything. Some ideas are 
beyond repair; others can perhaps be touched up; 
still others have stood the test of the onslaught. 
Many of the outlines are as com.pletely destroyed 



The Call to Reconstruction n 

as are the outlines of villages across which the pen- 
dulum of battle swung. The history of physical 
destruction in these past years has been in three 
chapters: first the frailest things went down, the 
weak superstructures, the twigs of trees, the shrubs ; 
then stronger things went down, trunks of trees 
were shredded or cut off at the roots, stone walls 
were crumbled to powder, the surface of the earth 
was plowed as with an earthquake; then there 
appeared a few abiding realities which were not 
broken; here and there an arm of stone reached 
up out of the hills and occasionally out of the 
plains and did not break under the shells that fell 
upon it or around it. There were not many of 
these, but most of the men who have seen have felt 
the thrill of finding one here and there. But all 
the while, and at the deepest of the ruin, it is only 
the surface that is churned up. Each of the chasms 
cut into the earth rests at its bottom in the undis- 
turbed earth which has received the wound but 
abides still. 

These are also the chapters of the destruction 
of recent years in the spiritual world. First, for 
thoughtful men there were swept away some care- 
lessly accepted complacencies which are supposed to 
be valuable but have no force in a time of strain; 
then there went more permanent ideas and we do 
not yet know when we shall recover them and what 
their renewed condition may be. Even to the end, 
however, there lasted the great verities rooted in 
the deep substance of humanity, expressing the ribs 
and keel of the moral universe. Some men have 
surveyed the field of spiritual destruction in these 



8 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

past years and have found none of these granite 
unpreachings. Others have seen them and rejoiced. 
Henry Drummond said of Millet's Angelus that 
its special charm lay in its combination of three 
attributes of human life: love, labor, religion. No 
one has suggested that love has been lessened in 
meaning by the war nor that labor has less meaning. 
Let no one suggest that religion has been lessened 
either. But as love has been challenged to become 
greater and more inclusive, and as labor has been 
called to assume new and heavier burdens for the 
enlarged circle of human responsibilities, so religion 
is challenged to enlarged outlook and wider outline. 
This is the undercurrent of a typical letter from 
a soldier in France just before he started for home: 

" Throughout my year of service over here, I have 
heard the men arguing and talking and have been ob- 
serving a great deal. I fully believe that in spite of 
the plain fact that in many cases ideals held back home 
have been lost over here for the time being, yet there 
is a fuller faith, a clearer insight to true values, and that 
the * old ' religious habits, so much discussed and v^ritten 
about, will again be taken up back home, and, having 
the faith and insight gained over here added to them, 
will clear the atmosphere for a wholesome, sincere, re- 
ligious life. I do not look for an immediate radical 
change, such as greatly multiplied church attendance and 
so forth, but I think the change will be steady and con- 
sistent toward a real religion of service, where little dif- 
ferences of creed will be disregarded and real essentials 
be acknowledged." 

There was awful significance in the presence 
across the warring countries of religious symbolism. 
It was impossible to escape a sense of contradiction 



The Call to Reconstruction 9 

in what one often saw. Here is a village, after 
the war and back of the lines, where soldiers clad 
and trained for warfare pass and repass, where vice 
walks openly, where women practice evil for gain, 
where men lie wounded and broken in hospital or 
stricken with disease in isolation camps — every- 
thing speaking of moral and social failure. Mean- 
while, there rises above it all some hoary tower 
or sharp spire crowned with a cross, or an arched 
doorway symbolizing the presence of religion. 
There is no escaping the conviction that this must 
conquer that in order to a rational world, but which 
is ** this ** and which is *^ that " is an abiding 
question. Whether we are to hope that the force 
which the tower and the spire and the cross sym- 
bolize shall overcome the force which the other 
objects in view symbolize has sent many a heart- 
burdened man to his quarters with a new serious- 
ness. But over and over as one passed the fields 
where the destruction has been greatest, or walked 
the streets where moral weakness revealed itself, 
one caught glimpses of the abiding reality of these 
spiritual forces which have not been destroyed in 
the midst of other calamity. Scenes of undying love, 
of unwearying labor, of unbroken religion spring 
before one's eyes in the instant. 

It is wisely said that there has been no change 
in the fundamentals of religion. Well, for that 
matter, there has been no change in the funda- 
mentals of anything — in government, nor human 
relationships, nor national responsibility. They 
have become more important than ever. But a 
sharp question has been raised about what are really 



lO The Christian Faith and the New Day 

fundamentals. What is this reality in government, 
society, education, religion, which can take so deep 
a gash and yet abide? The surface has been cut 
and gashed in the sight of all thoughtful men ; what 
is it that took that gash and reveals itself at the 
bottom of it? In presence of that question some 
lists of '' fundamentals ^' which are solemnly pro- 
nounced by some of the brethren are so petty as 
to seem incredible. These are not the things by 
which men^s souls live and die and that they grasp 
when the earth heaves beneath them. Our thinking 
will have to go deeper than that. 

Theology ought to follow the movements of 
religion. Doubtless when once it is formed it tends 
to mold the later expression of the highest religious 
life. It often goes beyond individual experience. 
There is a prophetic value in all faith; it gets us 
ready for experience yet to come; probably it never 
grips us fully until the experience does arise. But 
we do not go into the future safely with only that 
faith which we have already personally tested. It 
is not therefore suggested that theology shall express 
only the experience of a day or an age but only 
that it shall be rooted in religious experiences in 
the large way. The Christian theologian is not 
standing a humble suppliant at the edge of the 
world's struggle, asking what he can learn from 
it, and how he can modify his supposedly eternal 
truth to meet its conditions, his theology held in 
solution the while. He is in the very heart and 
center of the struggle, feeling it at its deepest and 
studying it with eagerness and pain, wanting to 
know where and how his faith furnishes rescue and 



The Call to Reconstruction 1 1 

help and anxious to discover that phase of his eternal 
truth which fits the need. His system is ready for 
reconstruction as the need of the world calls for new 
accent and assertion here or there, though he may 
be sure that the truth which he has systematized 
is lasting. 

Our practical, working theology has, especially, 
to sum up the movements of religion in our own day 
and to furnish the program for the day that lies 
just ahead. The real question is, therefore, whether 
there have been any changes in religion in recent 
times which require reconstruction of any part of 
its rational expression in theology. Has anything 
happened in men's relation to God and to one an- 
other which needs to affect our formal doctrine? 
And for most of us the answer must be in the 
affirmative. Not at all that wholly new facts have 
come across our horizon; not that either God or 
man has fundamentally changed. Probably Prin- 
cipal Garvie is right in saying {Christ and the 
World at War, 54) that nothing in the war has 
required any informed and responsible theologian 
to revise the articles of his faith. No new facts 
of God or man or sin or duty have emerged. At 
the same time there can be no doubt that some things 
look* different in the red glare of war and in the 
disturbances of recent years and will always look 
different afterwards. 

Three special demands are made on theology 
just now which call for reconstruction at various 
points : 

I. That it shall make recognition of the demo- 
cratic movement, examining again all those points 



I 2 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

where it has rested on autocracy and arbitrariness, 
and magnifying instead its personal and moral ele- 
ments. In three points at least this examination 
is necessary — in the theology of God, of salvation 
and of the church. 

2. It is required of theology that it hold itself 
steadily to the test of experience, experience con- 
ceived largely but none the less really, and that it 
give full credit to those elements in experience that 
have sustained men in their time of strain, adjusting 
its speculative elements to such realities. Again 
the three elements of its thought of God, salvation 
and the church enter into the reconstruction. 

3. It is required of theology that it furnish a 
working basis for the program of the Kingdom of 
God on earth. It is not to be merely a rational- 
izing of what men have felt but a projection of 
that experience into right relationships for the fu- 
ture. That is, theology may not be static; it must 
be vital. It must be what men may live by and 
what will produce the rich new order for which 
they have hoped and dreamed, for which some of 
them have died in these late years. 

Such things call for reconstruction at certain 
points. Just how they will be faced will depend 
largely on the disposition of the one who deals with 
them. A story is going the rounds of an '' eminent 
doctor of divinity " who closed a discussion on a 
difficult theological problem by saying, '' Well, 
gentlemen, speaking for myself I think I may venture 
to say that I should feel inclined to favor a tend- 
ency in a positive direction with reservations!*' 
Doubtless that is rather fine for a man who has 



The Call to Reconstruction 



13 



grown old and still feels that he may be on the 
threshold of the house of knowledp:c. Doiihtk^s 
also it is a wholly iinpossihh^ attitiuh' for men who 
arc ji:oinji; to meet and (h-al with the (luestions of 
the new day as they sliould be dealt with. 

It is possible also to take the attitude of a familiar 
scriptural ineich'nt toward these (juestions. It is 
in Acts 19 when the Christian faith was being intro- 
duced into r.pliesus and a certain Ah^xaruh'r tried 
to address the crowd gathered in the public scpiare. 
The account says that when they discovered that 
he was a Jew a roar broke out from all and for 
about two hours they shouted, '^ Great is Diana 
of the M|)besians! '* That he nught be a Jew with 
a new message, that he might have light to shed on 
the dark places in life, that he might have such 
arginiients as would strengthen and not destroy their 
faith, they did not stop to consich... They merely 
set up a dogmatic tenet of faith against him. The 
town-crier had much the better of it for he argued 
that such noisy assertion paid the compliment of 
fear to folly and that all sensible men knew that 
Diana is great! If one must choose between merely 
dogmatic assertion which tries to stop the spread 
of a new idea and the indifference that insists on 
taking the old truth for granted, it is the latter that 
has the field to-day, l)ut neither is possible for men 
who sense tlie new day. Nor will they be dealt 
with by abandonment of truth in the interest of 
other truth. When Conan Doyle spoke of the 
eternal *' duel '* between men and women, I^Vances 
Willard asked if he did not mean the eternal '^ duet *' 
between men and women. When it is proposed 



14 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

that between truth and truth there is a duel, the 
same correction comes to one's mind. Hegel sug- 
gested that the real tragedy of progress is not the 
struggle between right and wrong but between 
right and right. It is truth against truth that makes 
the tragedy of the progress of which we are speak- 
ing. The question theology has to face to-day is 
not whether it shall count what it has held false 
but how it shall find the underlying reality of those 
surfaces which have been broken and provide for 
the rebuilding of the order which has been destroyed. 



II 

THE CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY OF GOD 

We turn first to the Christian thought of God. 
A chaplain at the front wrote what many men felt 
and still feel, that *' the essential question is, What 
is God like ? *^ Of course that is an essential question 
in theology always. It is a more popular question 
than it has even been in this generation. Atheism 
is neither the fashion nor the concern of most men 
now. One of our American surgeons can return 
from the battle fields and write a grewsome and 
unsympathetic book on the mechanistic conception 
of war and peace, in which men are warned that 
they must expect no help in their struggle from 
above or outside themselves. But an equally able 
surgeon, spending longer time there and giving his 
own life even more fully can return to Great Britain 
to say that he can find no ground for the mechanistic 
conception of life and that " the indomitable logic 
of facts has driven (him) to the conclusion that 
behind all and above all there is an intelligent and 
beneficent Mind, immanent in nature and in the 
life of men.'* Atheism has no vogue to-day. 

I. There has developed instead a utilitarian idea 
of God. Men have wanted to know what was the 
use of being religious or devoted if it does not bring 
results in their outward lives. Professor Gilbert 
Murray thinks that recent events have tended to 

15 



1 6 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

discourage the higher kinds of religion and immensely 
strengthen the lower. An English writer adds that 
for many men God has been merely the equivalent 
of an extra rifle. It always puzzled such men that 
soldiers who said their prayers at night got shot 
the next day, while those who never troubled to 
pray went scot-free. They could not see under those 
conditions what was the use of religion. 

A similar feeling underlies the discussion of the 
religion of the countries involved. Is not any talk 
of the victory of righteousness to be qualified by 
the fact that the central powers of Europe were 
as actively professors of religion as those who op- 
posed them? The question presupposes that 
religion is utilitarian and God a useful factor in 
bringing things out of the way we like them, the 
trouble in the case being that He was invoked on 
both sides of the conflict. It must be admitted that 
there has been some warrant for that in theology 
and in much current religion. For example, it has 
been strongly argued that God's relation to the 
world is such that we can count a calamity a pun- 
ishment for some particular evil. How were we 
to explain the war? We were urged to say that 
it was a judgment on the drink bill of England, 
or on the atrocities committed by the Belgian king 
upon the people of Africa, or on the desertion of the 
Christian faith by France or on the materialism of 
America. One popular leader rings the changes on 
the phrase that God is *' squaring the account '' with 
Belgium, skeptical France, and other nations, as 
He " squared the account " with the Jews for 
rejecting Christ by having them harried and dis- 



The Christian Theology of God ij 

tressed by Titus and Vespasian. The earthquake 
in San Francisco was because of the sin of the 
people there. A theater burns down because of 
the mad rush of people for pleasure. The inference 
is that if a city were soundly Christian, there would 
be no earthquakes, and if people did not madly rush 
after pleasure theaters would not burn down. That 
is, religion would be immensely useful in warding 
off otherwise natural calamities. 

There is a verse, to be sure, which says that 
godliness is profitable for the life that now is, and 
obviously it is true in its sphere. But if theology 
makes out of that a tenet it must reckon with a 
relation between outer experiences and inner con- 
ditions which would be exceedingly difficult to work 
out into a system, unless we fall back into the ranks 
of the three friends of Job and declare that suffering 
is always measured by the sin that precedes it, the 
greater the sin the greater the suffering, and there 
are indications that this theory does not meet divine 
approval in the long run. Some men, like Job 
himself, find it simply impossible to agree to it while 
they are passing through the experience. It is only 
while one is looking on from a distance that it seems 
logical. 

The truth is, we need to get our idea of God on 
the basis of morality and off the basis of arbitrariness. 
Teachers and social officers in general are compelled 
to adopt arbitrary punishments for offenses. There 
is no logical connection between my stealing a 
horse and my being put in prison, nor between my 
striking a man in the face and paying ten dollars 
fine. One does not grow out of the other. The 



1 8 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

two are simply attached by law. That is arbitrary 
and the best we can do. But in God's plans sins 
work out into logical consequences. In an im- 
portant sense, the crime produces the punishment. 
The man who tells a lie does not get slapped in 
the face nor put into prison for ten days. He has 
something far worse happen to him and by no 
ingenuity can he escape it — he becomes a liar with 
all that that means in a moral order. Something 
eats into his character. He loses his inner relia- 
bility. It is not something done to him — that 
is left for society to see to; it is something done 
in him — that is what God sees to in his moral 
order. God's way of punishment is immensely more 
dreadful than our way of doing it. Bringing earth- 
quakes on evil cities would be exactly our way of 
doing it, and we would encourage ourselves to it 
by the account of Sodom and Gomorrah, assuming 
that the divine eye could not find in any city the 
necessary ten righteous men whose presence would 
make the destruction of the city because of its wick- 
edness unfair by divine declaration. Ravaging 
Belgium would be just our way of *^ squaring the 
account " for Congo atrocities committed by rulers 
over whom the suffering people had no control. 
God's way of punishing is far more serious than 
ours. There is not a city that is not suffering 
under his moral hand at this moment for the evils 
it has encouraged. The punishment of England 
for its drink bill is only too obvious in England 
to-day, not in something done to England and 
Englishmen, but in something done in the very 
midst of England and deep down in the powers of 



The Christian Theology of God 19 

multitudes of the English. France has marks 
enough of the penalty of its refusal of the inspira- 
tions and safeguards of religion. And the material- 
ism of America — its punishment runs deeper than 
a European war ! Society handles an offender phys- 
ically. God handles him morally. The ominous 
thing is not being punished but being the kind of 
person who ought to be punished and who in a 
moral order can no more escape punishment than 
he can escape any other inevitable consequence. 
That conception of God's relation to events in our 
lives is not at all common, and it was missing it 
that led so many men into purely utilitarian ideas 
of religion. There was an element of truth in 
their thought, but it lacked a moral basis. 

2. This is only a hint, however, of the serious 
question which theology has to face to-day in its 
thought of God. It is peremptorily confronted 
with the double problem of God's omnipotence 
and of his love — how it can hold the two together, 
what it means by both, how far each of them 
extends. It was natural that the great question 
about God should be an old one only sharpened by 
recent conditions. How shall we conceive a God 
who is all-loving and all-powerful, in whose world 
certain kinds of things happen? We faced it years 
ago in social conditions and many earnest social 
workers, loving their fellows, quietly abandoned 
religion and God in their plans and set out sac- 
rificingly to correct conditions in which it seemed 
that God was not concerned. Social settlements 
appeared in most cities which made no pretense to 
any religious impulses. We count them mistaken, 



20 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

and weakened by the omission, but their mistake 
roots in another farther back, and it was our mis- 
take. We had not worked out the relation which 
any really powerful and loving God would hold to 
the world. In a village in France a Christian 
minister of mature age, experienced in church lead- 
ership, said to me that a God who could sit calmly 
in heaven while his children were being tortured 
without giving them any sign of interest and without 
putting out his own hand to stay the ruin, could 
no longer command his respect. The remark was 
made in a conversation when I was asking him 
to undertake responsibility for some definitely 
religious work, which he almost scornfully refused. 
Some one is responsible for men ever having such 
a thought of God as that. It may not be the 
theologians, though some of them are doubtless 
to blame; it may be the ministers, though doubtless 
we have sometimes spoken as though there were 
somewhere such a God; but for some reason 
thousands of persuaded Christians went into this 
direful situ'ation with that thought of God — that 
he was either unwilling or unable to keep this 
thing from happening. Down in their hearts they 
were sure that if they had the power they had always 
ascribed to him, they would have stopped it. It 
was the old, old dilemma — either God did not 
love men enough to care, or else in spite of his 
loving, he was not strong enough to prevent what 
occurred. As one writer declares: '* God is help- 
less to prevent war or else he wills it and approves 
of it. There is the alternative. You pay your 
money and you take your choice.'* That is, you 



The Christian Theology of God 21 

cannot have an omnipotent and loving God and not 
have everything the W2iy he wants it. You can 
surrender his omnipotence as Mr. Wells and 
Studdart Kennedy think they do, or you can sur- 
render his love as many depressed people do; but 
you cannot have both and keep your eyes open to 
the facts of life — that is the argument. 

And if the current understanding of God's om- 
nipotence were correct, the conclusions are per- 
fectly right and we are thrown back as Christians 
on silence as the only fitting habit in presence of 
so great a mystery. The truth is, however, that 
this view of God's omnipotence is almost completely 
mistaken. It is an idea of power lowered to a 
purely physical basis and it should be lifted to a 
personal and moral level. God's relation to the 
world is a personal one when we come into the 
realm of personalities at all, and in the personal 
field there can be no such thing as physical om- 
nipotence. Persons are not handled on that basis. 
Persons could not exercise omnipotence in that sense 
if they had it. What we mean by omnipotence is 
that God has power to do anything that he can do 
and go on being God. There are some things which 
are impossible to God just because he is God. An 
irrational act is impossible, no matter if it does 
involve merely the exercise of physical power. An 
immoral act is impossible. An act unworthy of him- 
self is always impossible for any person in the degree 
of the development of his moral personality. It is 
impossible, that is, that in a moral world we should 
be treated as though we were not moral beings; 
that in a rational world we should be handled on 



2 2 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

an irrational basis. Herein lies the truth in the 
Wells view — there are limitations upon the divine 
action, limitations which he has himself imposed or 
which are imposed by his being himself and not some 
other kind of a Being. They rest in the thought 
that he is God, acts in God-like ways and not in 
crassly physical ways. If we are to be in a rational 
world the means that are set for ends must not be 
triflingly handled, abandoned when they are not 
pleasant, resumed when it is arbitrarily determined 
to do so; and if ends are to be sought at all they 
must be sought in ways worthy of the world in 
which we are to live. 

The war itself is a good evidence of the om- 
nipotence of God, in that it showed that the moral 
universe was maintained in the midst of the chaos 
of destruction. The one Being who did not fail 
in the whole cataclysm is God. In the physical 
world he did not fail, for there was never a bit 
of shrapnel or ammunition which did not obey the 
law of its being to the last fraction. In the moral 
world he did not fail, for the moral forces have 
wrought themselves out exactly as we might have 
known they would if we had thought enough about 
them. The only failures in this war have been 
in the limitations of personalities where men have 
not reacted upon the call of morality as they 
should. The distresses of the war have arisen from 
a firm universe in which still lies all our hope. We 
ran against a universe that did not even quiver 
when we struck it. How its firmness works 
purposes or love in our weakness is always a living 
question which finds its answer in the fact of 



The Christian Th*eology of God 23 

God's personality and his moral relation to other 
moral beings. That is the force of two stanzas 
written long before the war but more full of 
meaning to-day : — 

" The cry of man's anguish went up unto God : 

* Lord, take away pain — 

This shadow that darkens the wprld thou hast made, 

The ,cIose-coiling chain 
That strangles the heart, the burden that weighs 

On the wings that would soar; 
Lord, take away pain from the world thou hast made, 

That it love thee the more.' 

Then answered the Lord to the cry of the world: 

* Shall I take away pain 

And with it the power of the soul to endure, 

Made strong by the strain? 
Shall I take away pity that knits heart to heart, 

And sacrifice high? 
Will ye lose all your heroes that lift from the fire 

White brows to the sky? 
Shall I take away love, that redeems with a price 

And smiles at its loss? 
Can ye spare from your love that would climb into Mine 

The Christ on his cross ? ' " 

And we find that we do not really want an easy 
universe. Whether its difficulties and distresses 
are for the production of these results or not, it is 
obvious that the results do come out of them. It 
is by a ruling or an overruling. In either case, 
the richness of life, its very existence as a moral 
order, its very fundamentals of social relationships, 
indeed, the only hope for our becoming self- 
respecting because divinely respected personalities, 
runs back to these experiences. Somewhere we have 



24 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

to get these results. It is open to us to argue that 
they should have been gotten some other way. It 
IS not open to us to argue that they are not worth 
having if this is the only way to get them. What 
we want to know is only that these troubles and 
distresses in a moral order are leading somewhere. 
And that runs us back squarely to a God who is 
morally and not merely physically powerful and who 
is rational enough to wield in the moral world only 
moral weapons. 

And that, in turn, is the essence of democracy. It 
does not imply that we and God are on an equality ; 
not even men are that in any democracy nor any 
possible human order. It does imply that God is 
never autocratic in dealing with personalities, that 
in the moral order there is a fine and inspiring re- 
spect paid to personality and its rights, that it is 
never arbitrarily dealt with. Such an assurance 
would have made impossible the saying of a religious 
leader in our own country, that it is not to Kaiser 
William that we are to look, but to Kaiser Jesus, 
and that the only autocrat who needs never to give 
an account of himself is Almighty God. In no 
historical sense of the word can God be called an 
autocrat, and in every sense of the word he does 
give an account of himself to any heart that asks 
account. He is a sovereign, and the only one the 
earth knows, who gives his subjects liberty and 
trains them to freedom, allowing them in the 
process of training such wanderings as their per- 
sonalities choose, harmful as they may be. 

Theology must restate its doctrine of God until 



The Christian Theology of God 25 

the attributes ascribed to him do not conflict with 
the central fact of his moral personality. 

3. We are required also to universalize our idea 
of God's love. We have been thrown so closely 
together that it is quite impossible for us to con- 
tinue feeling that the love of God runs on narrow 
lines or is based on special actions on the part of 
men. A young Japanese once said to me quizzically 
that the largest peril of the present reigning family 
in his nation lies in chemical analysis, for it may 
happen some day that a drop of blood of that 
family may be analyzed at the same time as that 
of a peasant and when they are found to be exactly 
alike, then it would overthrow the theory that the 
royal family is of peculiar divine origin! Paul 
was probably not thinking in chemical terms when 
he said something very similar in Athens to the effect 
that God had made of one blood all nations of the 
earth. We have held that theory without hesitation 
but some of our theological dicta have obscured the 
facts from our minds. 

The verses of Scripture on the universality of 
the love of God are clear enough until you begin 
to interpret them. A practical, hard-working min- 
ister said a while ago that John 3:16 has to be 
interpreted to be understood and that we must not 
take too easily the meaning of the *' world " which 
God loves. The argument is this : God is infinitely 
holy and in the nature of the case he cannot love 
anything that is unholy; the ** world '' that he loves 
cannot be the world of evil men therefore, and God 
can love only those who are good, made good by 



26 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

Christ's redemption. Christ came that God may 
love the world, that he might make it the kind of 
world that a holy God can love and still be holy. 
And I recall inquiries from thoughtful, Bible-loving 
laymen asking for texts to indicate that God's atti- 
tude toward all men is that of a Father, their own 
study of Scripture having led them to the thought 
that God's fatherhood, apart from mere creation, 
is only toward Christ and those who come into filial 
relation with him through Christ. How could he 
be in any sense Father to bad men, who are of their 
father the devil? The conclusion seems to follow 
from the premises. 

Most theological sytems of the past set out from 
God's holiness. Everything was to be tested by 
that. He could not treat sin as he would like 
because holiness forbade it. Out of that position 
came the popular thought that Christ is God's mercy 
preventing his holiness from doing what it would 
have done because of sin. Out of it came the theory 
of the atonement that finds in Christ's death a 
satisfaction for God's holiness by supplying an ad- 
equate punishment for finite sin. In the hier- 
archy of divine attributes, holiness is supreme; 
whatever God may be or do, He will not sacrifice 
that trait. It demands a right penalty for sin and 
the penalty is necessarily that meted out to offenders 
against the rightful sovereign. The sin is infinite 
because it is committed against an infinite God. It 
is unspeakable rebellion because the holiness of God 
is spotless and awesome. The death of the sinner 
is inevitable, therefore, unless the love of God, 
taking full account of the heinousness of the sin. 



The Christian Theology of God 27 

should provide a way of escape. This saves 
the holiness of God as well as the sinning man. 

Later writers have set out from God's love and 
have allowed that to overshadow his holiness and 
the evil of human sin. Popularly it began in 
America with Henry Ward Beecher in his reaction 
against sterner views of his father Lyman Beecher. 
According to this view, God can do anything with 
sin and evil that he cares to do because he loves 
sinners so much, and Christ's atonement becomes 
merely an evidence to sinful men of God's love 
which could disregard sin the instant the sinner 
repented. Nothing in God called for the atone- 
ment; only the sinner's blindness to the divine love 
required it. Special stress is always laid on the 
parable of the prodigal son and the welcome of 
the father without reference to any effort of the 
sinner to make atonement for his sin or any plans 
of the father to make it right. His love counted 
it right as soon as the son permitted it to do 
so. Love is given the highest place in the hierarchy 
of attributes. 

It must be said that neither view has worked 
well in these recent crises. We feel somewhat as 
Lord Morley felt at the end of his Recollections 
about the effect of science on human progress, writ- 
ten in the shadow of the war : " Has not your school 
— the Darwins, Spencers, Renans and the rest, held 
the civilized world, both old and new alike, in 
the hollow of their hand for two long generations 
past? Is it quite clear that their influence has 
been so much more potent than the gospel of the 
various churches? Circumspice ! " If we are to 



2 8 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

assume that religious ideas are to have any influence 
at all we shall have to say that no one has anything 
to boast about just now. The two schools are 
busily blaming each other. Each is sure that it 
was the loss of its own particular point of view 
that explains the mischief. Everything in recent 
years has confirmed the extremists of both wings 
in their most dogmatic positions. A naive student 
asked if the war would not result in the correcting 
of both the ^' liberal " and the '^ conservative *' 
wings of theology and the church ! Nothing is apt 
to do that. Books and articles are in ample evi- 
dence now to show that the war has proved both 
sides right! If only the world had taken account 
of the holiness of God, or if only it had reckoned 
with the love of God — everything would have 
been different. The real error was in taking the 
other point of view which landed the world in 
a spurious idea of God and duty. There seems to 
have been little heart-searching about positions to 
which men were solidly committed before the war. 
Now that it is over, we are having the same opposing 
schools, starting with divine holiness or with divine 
love. 

Meanwhile, many thoughtful men are hesitating 
over this easy habit of playing off one attribute 
against another. A reconstructed theology must set 
out from the point of view of a total personality, 
not making any one trait or attribute a test, any 
more than we do with finite personalities which 
we understand better than we do infinite ones. 
The holiness-theologies undoubtedly gain strength 
and rigidity. The love-theologies gain warmth 



The Christian Theology of God 29 

and tenderness. But either gain can become loss 
when It is carried out of reach of the other. In- 
creasingly it becomes evident that there can be no 
warfare within a total and complete personality 
and that no trait sits on the throne of such a per- 
sonality. The traits of God are all phases of the 
one central face of his Person. There can be 
no holiness that is not loving. There can be no 
love that is not holy. Tenderness that is not strong 
is not even tender, and strength that is not tender 
is not even strong. All this, provided we are 
thinking in terms of personality. If we should 
lose ourselves in terms of physical endurance and 
force, the situation would change, but we must not 
lose ourselves there. 

Now, if we think in terms of personality, letting 
it include all the traits that go to make up moral 
character, it is not difficult to universalize the love 
of God. He can love sinful men, as the Bible says 
he does. The whole plan of salvation wrought 
through Christ becomes an expression, increasingly 
natural as we come to understand it, of a personal 
relation to persons. It is an outcome of a holy 
love or a loving holiness such as, when once it has 
occurred, we see to be wholly logical. Very prob- 
ably it is too great a thing for us to have fore- 
seen. But so is a glorious sunset or a radiant 
waterfall; it is only after we have seen it that we 
realize how it expresses the forces resident in nature. 
We could not have known the plan of God for 
the saving of men, but once he makes it known, 
we can work it out as a natural outcome of his 
being the God he is. 



30 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

Theology needs to leave the arbitrariness of its 
theory of God's action or his attitude and to find 
in his infinite personality the assurance of his moral 
relation to moral beings. That is what democracy 
suggests. Moreover, it is what experience sus- 
tains and it is the hope of the future for further 
moral development. 



Ill 

THE CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY OF 
SALVATION 

It was suggested that a second matter which the- 
ology has to face with new interest is that of 
salvation. Two questions emerge afresh: What 
does salvation mean? and, How is salvation accom- 
plished? They are not new questions at all, but 
events of recent years have made certain answers 
impossible and have cleared the way for certain 
sounder answers. 

A careful use of words would probably show that 
there is not much difference among Christian teach- 
ers between " being a Christian " and *^ being 
saved." Some would object to the identification, 
on the ground that some were *^ saved ** before the 
coming of Christ and others since His coming who 
have held no conscious relation to Him and cannot 
be called '' Christians " in the familiar sense. But 
these have settled on a use of the word Christian 
to which others would object as too narrow. If 
they believe that some are *^ saved '* without ref- 
erence to the historical Christ, it is still because of 
what Christ represents in history that God '* saves " 
them. On the other hand, those who insist that 
it is only through knowledge of the historical 
Christ that men can be ** saved," will of course 
insist also that the two phrases are identical. The 

31 



32 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

phrases come to mean the same thing, with tre- 
mendous diflferences between thinkers on what it 
means to '' be a Christian/^ Whatever it means, 
that is also what it means to ** be saved/' Perhaps 
it need hardly be said that no such identification 
would be admitted outside the distinctively 
Christian circles, and that there are ways of 
declaring it which would be offensive to many 
Christian believers. For all that, in practical 
uses the connection is certain. 

With that assumption we may need to face anew 
the old question. What is a Christian ? When can 
a man count himself a Christian and when can the 
church count him one? Since a man is necessarily 
a thinking, feeling, choosing being, the test may lie 
in any one or two or all of those points. What 
must he think in. order to be a Christian? How 
much creed, how much right opinion, how much 
belief, enters into it? Or what must be his spirit 
of life? Is he to feel something or some way, 
and if so what is that feeling and how is it to be 
brought about and made permanent in his life? 
Or is it a matter of choosing, taking one road or 
another at the parting of ways, and what is the 
choice? What issue of life is actually involved? 
And if we say that it is all three, then how far 
must a man go in each before we can say that he is 
a Christian? 

Test it sharply, and in a very narrow field, by 
this: If a man is following Christ as his master 
of life, letting his decisions be shaped by his sense 
of Christ's will, trusting his love and grace, and 
yet doubts or denies his virgin birth or his mirac- 



The Christian Theology of Salvation 33 

ulous power on earth or his essential deity — will 
you count him a Christian brother? Of course it 
is open to you to say that he is illogical and that 
the things he denies are implicit in the things he 
accents so far as he does go; but is he, illogical 
and defective, to be counted a Christian brother 
and welcomed to all the rights of brotherhood? 
You consider that he acts admirably and thinks 
abominably; what will you think about him as a 
Christian? If he wanted to join your church, 
would you want him to do so ? On the other hand : 
If a man is clear and convinced on the things just 
mentioned, regular in his public religious activities, 
but runs his business on a cruel, inhumane basis, 
disregards the rights of his employee or his em- 
ployer, discourages all movements for the bettering 
of industrial or economic conditions if they dis- 
turb his business or his work — will you count him 
a Christian brother? Again you can say that he 
is illogical and that if he were true to what he 
says he believes he would act differently, but is he, 
illogical and defective, to be counted a Christian 
brother and welcomed to all the rights of brother- 
hood? In this case, you consider that he thinks 
admirably but acts abominably; what will you 
think about him as a Christian? If he wanted to 
join your church, would you want him to do so ? 

That is far more than an academic question but 
it is primarily academic. It is a theological ques- 
tion, for it requires us to state what we mean by 
salvation. Most of us reveal our instinctive or 
developed sense of fundamental Christianity by 
saying Yes, about the first man whose life is 



34 ^^^ Christian Faith and the New Day 

right and whose ideas are defective, and either No, 
or a hesitant Yes, about the second who reverses 
the situation. Being a Christian has come to mean 
to us being a man who takes a certain attitude 
toward God and his fellows that is expressed better 
in his way of living than in any other way. It 
is an attitude inspired by Christ or caused by him 
or like his or some way allied to him, but it is an 
attitude toward life and God and righteousness and 
humanity. Salvation is vital, not mechanical. 
Being a Christian is not a formality but is a de- 
scription of a living process. So living is it that 
this very quality creates much of the confusion in 
the common use of the word " salvation." It has 
a commencement, a continuance and a consum- 
mation. Sometimes a man is called a Christian or 
is spoken of as saved at any one of those stages. An 
evangelist tells him he can be saved before he goes 
out of the door; he says himself that he is being 
saved increasingly; and he prays that God may 
save him at last! It is by a true instinct that 
one word has been allowed to cover all those 
experiences, because they are all phases of one vital 
process, which begins and goes on and finally gets 
somewhere. Meanwhile, holiness is not abnormal; 
it is merely wholesomeness in a moral universe. A 
Christian is not a special kind of man; he is a 
normal man in the world of a moral God, living 
the normal life. Most of us have an uneasy feeling 
that this is at least the way it ought to be, though 
we are apt to be a bit concerned over the way it 
must look to people outside! It is not always 
easy to observe health of soul in some whom we 



The Christian Theology of Salvation 3^ 

count saved, nor in ourselves, but that is surely 
what being saved ought to mean — moral whole- 
someness, sane adaptation to the rational universe. 
Believing on Christ makes a man a Christian because 
it starts him on a way of living and gives him an 
attitude toward God that he did not have while 
he wanted his own wrong way. 

But even if we should agree on that, we still have 
before us the question sharpened by the war as to 
the way in which this new relation to God and 
to life is brought about or how this health of the 
soul is accomplished. We do not end the dis- 
cussion by saying that since the man becomes a 
Christian it must be done by Christ. Certainly, 
but what is theology to mean by that? How is it 
to rationalize the experience that comes with it ? 

And we are shut up to three positions among 
which we must choose. First, we can say that all 
salvation comes from conscious and intelligent ac- 
ceptance of the historical Christ and his saving 
work, which is what most Christian people say, 
and what most of our theology implies. Or, sec- 
ondly, we can say that while Christ saves all who 
believe in him, yet there are others who are saved 
by being honest with what they do believe and 
practice; which is what a great many Christians 
practically believe about the heathen and their 
neighbors whom they like but who are not doing 
anything about their souls. Or, thirdly, we can 
think of the historical figure of Christ as accomplish- 
ing in time what had been the eternal fact in God 
and can find the Holy Spirit of God working before 
and since that historical fact among multitudes of 



36 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

men who have not known the history, saving them 
through the sacrifice of Christ, redeeming them 
by his death as truly as though they saw him plainly. 
In this view Christ is still the only Savior, yet 
he saves far more widely than under the first view. 
There are only those three positions, if we are to 
talk of salvation at all. 

It was no phenomenon peculiar to this war that 
men dying on the battle field were accounted saved. 
It has been the thought of every war to some degree 
and it is the thought between wars when men die 
heroically for others. He is a feckless man who 
raises public question about the eternal safety with 
God of any man who passes through such an 
experience, no matter what his previous life may 
have been or what his personal character was. A 
man who casts away his own life to save a child 
or any innocent person becomes immediately a hero 
and washes away his past stains in public thinking. 
It is a persistent thought. Some take it as evidence 
of the pride of the human heart that seeks to save 
itself by some merit of its own. Others are not so 
sure. It is an idea worth examining just now. 

Such a calamity as that of recent years has re- 
enforced the central Christian principle of vicarious 
sacrifice, practiced by Christ and laid down for his 
followers. A philosopher who fortunately was not 
spared to witness the shame of his own nation 
(Paulsen, System of Ethics, 159) said it years ago: 
*' The world lives by the vicarious death of the just 
and innocent. Whatever system-loving theology 
may have made of it, it remains the profoundest 
philosophical-historical truth. The nations owe their 



The Christian Theology of Salvation 3*7 

existence to the willingness of the best and the most 
unselfish, the strongest and the purest, to offer them- 
selves for sacrifice. Whatever humanity possesses 
of the highest good has been achieved by such men 
and their reward has been misunderstanding, con- 
tempt, exile and death. The history of humanity 
is the history of martyrdom ; the text of the sermon 
which is called the history of mankind is the text to 
the Good Friday sermon from the fifty-third chap- 
ter of the prophet Isaiah." Over against this must 
be set much accepted thought. 

It was only in the summer of 19 19 that there 
died a man who must share largely in responsibility 
for the mistaken thinking which underlay the errors 
of the Central Powers of Europe. Ernst Haeckel 
was never immensely popular in Germany, but the 
main idea for which he stood and which his Riddle 
of the Universe set out had tremendous weight with 
the leaders of the nation. Personally he was far 
finer than his creed. His pupils speak of the contra- 
diction they felt between the necessary conclusions 
of what Haeckel taught and the apparent spirit 
of the man himself. The story goes back to 
Darwin and the Origin of Species, The theory of 
the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest 
came to Haeckel as a revelation. He took the book 
to Italy for a time of study and assimilation and 
found himself committed to the theory in its baldest 
form. Darwin and his Anglo-Saxon followers 
never took it so unrestrainedly as did Haeckel. 
With them there was always the note of altruism 
when the higher ranges of life came into view, an 
altruism hinted even from the first. What came 



38 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

to be called ^* the struggle for the life of others " 
appeared alongside the struggle for life. Love be- 
came a factor and love means sacrifice. John 
Fiske's contribution to the theory, the prolongation 
of infancy in the human species as the foundation 
of the family, is a phase of that new factor. For 
Haeckel there was no alleviating factor. The 
strongest survive in the struggle and they deserve 
to survive, showing their worth by their survival. 
That naturally plaj^s into the hands of the strong. 
Rising against them is defying the law of the uni- 
verse. They are up because they deserve to be up. 
It is not to their interest, nor within their respon- 
sibility, to have lower people come up. The strong 
have the right to rule; they have earned it. This 
involved the denial of any personal or moral factor 
at the heart of the universe, and for Haeckel God 
is not to be conceived as a Person or as having 
interest for humanity. ^' God is the universal law 
of casualty *' and all things are grounded in that 
law. The Christian law of progress by sacrifice, 
the principle of vicarious suffering, could have no 
place in that scheme. It was Paulsen against 
Haeckel, and for Germany Haeckel won, but for 
the world Paulsen won. 

Jesus has prevented our narrowing that principle 
to his own sacrifice by calling all his followers to 
take the same path and accomplish in lesser ways 
the results which he accomplished greatly for the 
race. The apostle Paul frankly rejoices in his suf- 
ferings for the sake of his friends at Colossae 
(Col. 1 124) and for the sake of the church because 
he is ^' filling up " in those experiences '' that which 



The Christian Theology of Salvation 39 

IS lacking of the sufferings of Christ." The saying 
is much discussed, but there can be no question of 
its obvious correlation of the sacrifices and suffer- 
ings of the Master and of His disciples. It is 
nowhere pretended that their sacrifice is equivalent 
to his own, and yet it is of the very essence of 
the Christian faith that self-forgetfulness, self-sacri- 
fice, shall be magnified and its greatness recognized. 

It is no wonder that such sacrifice, on so mag- 
nificent a scale as a great war presents, or as the 
closer relationships of the better social order demand, 
should challenge theology to interpret and evaluate 
it. And much theological thinking of the past has 
prepared the way for finding a saving value in this 
personal sacrifice by centering its attention on the 
single event of the death of Christ as the one saving 
fact. Instead of emphasizing the fact that it was 
the death of Christ that is God's way of saving 
men, it has disconnected his death from his per- 
son. Actually it is Christ who saves, not just some- 
body who died on Calvary. Once get salvation on 
a cataclysmic basis and you are ready for a change 
of cataclysms. Connect it with one historical event, 
dissociated from the events or the character that 
precede it, and you have introduced a note which 
can be sounded regarding other events as well. But 
get it on a vital basis, a change of relationship, and 
you can challenge proposals for that change which 
are not adequate. 

The Westminster Confession speaks at one diffi- 
cult point, how difficult no one knows better than 
a teacher of theology, of the fact that the Holy 
Spirit worketh when and where and how he pleaseth. 



40 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

At this other difficult point we need to keep that 
in mind. It is never well to set arbitrary bounds 
on what the Spirit of God may be doing with the 
saving power of Christ. Experience with men in 
the war, as with many men outside the war, shows 
how often sins are the surface fact and a spirit 
born of God is the underlying fact. There are 
men who show the mastery of God first of all in 
their outer lives, correcting their speech and their 
habits ; there are other men who are mastered there 
last of all, their inner spirits being changed almost 
without their own realization. Christ has girded 
them, though they have not known him. God is 
holding them, though they do not recognize his hand 
on them. 

A chaplain who had once been my student stood 
by me one evening as we prepared for a meeting 
when I would address his men, men with whom he 
had gone through blood and fire. His one charge 
to me was confirmed by many experiences of my 
own : " Do not argue for God with my men ; they 
have all had an experience with God. What they 
need is some one to interpret their experiences to 
them, to help them realize that it was God in very 
truth with whom they had their dealings in the 
great hour when the experience came to them." 
Many men have awaked from their desert sleep 
whose memory of their vision is so dim that they do 
not know enough to say, '' Surely God is in this 
place,'^ until another, an interpreter for God, comes 
by and recalls the vision. 

Only Christ can save — we can be clear on 
that. No new question has necessarily arisen about 



The Christian Theology of Salvation 41 

it. We may ground the assurance on the Scripture 
or on the nature of the case, on history or on 
philosophy, as we think best, but the case can be 
argued without anxiety. Theology has no occasion 
to alter its familiar position regarding it. But 
when we speak of Christ, what do we mean ? The 
historical figure of Bethlehem and Calvary — of 
course. But is he more and other than that ? Does 
he save men who do not know or recognize his 
name? Does he form his new life within diseased 
souls and make them whole, or give them the 
beginnings of new health, while they think they still 
reject him? And deeper than that, may not men 
reject every vision their fellows have given them 
of Christ, who yet would rise up to meet him as 
Lord and Master if they once saw him as he is? 
To all these questions, events of recent years have 
enabled us to give a joyous affirmative answer. It 
is a sound feeling that men who show in their 
crises the spirit of sacrifice have found a point of 
contact between the human spirit and the divine 
phases of the human order. It is not personal sac- 
rifice that saves; no one knows that better than the 
men who have offered themselves for such sacrifice. 
Personal suffering does not set a man right with 
the moral universe; no intelligent sufferer thinks 
it does. But the presence of that spirit in the life 
argues for an open way to harmony with the central 
principle of the moral order. Men may go all 
their lives indifferent to what they suppose Christ 
means, and then find him when their own path of 
life leads them into view of Calvary and his cross. 
It is in the vision of Christ as he is, not as some 



42 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

one else says he is, that every soul takes its position. 
In that vision the soul inevitably says, '' There is 
no beauty in him that I should desire him," or 
else, " My Lord and my God ! " But the soul may 
have come to the very end with no real vision of 
Christ, in spite of the faulty, feeble attempts of 
other men to make that vision clear. There are 
ways of presenting Christ which every soul ought 
to reject; they are morally unsound, religiously im- 
possible. And there is no way in which he is pre- 
sented by any one kind of men that can insure a 
true understanding of him by all other men. Yet 
it is he and not some one's idea of him that tests 
character. And what makes that so tremendously 
eventful is that it announces one's attitude toward 
the universe, acceptance of its fundamental prin- 
ciple or rejection of it. It is not an arbitrary con- 
dition which an autocratic God has set up. It is 
an expression of the central fact of the moral order. 
Yet we often speak of it as though if God chose 
to have that kind of a test for the soul, he had 
a right to have it and he could have had any other 
test if he had chosen. We must come to a deeper 
sense of it than that. If there is to be a moral 
universe at all, then it is exactly this kind of reality 
which determines the attitude of the soul toward it. 
That is the force of the saying that when the 
Holy Spirit comes He will convict the world of 
sin because it does not believe on Christ (John 
16:9). It is a recognition of Christ as a test fact. 
Men who do not approve him when he presents 
himself to them do not approve God, nor a right 
humanity, nor the moral universe. Sin is not a 



The Christian Theology of Salvation 43 

mere violation of some undefended law arbitrarily 
imposed; it is getting wrong with the univierse and 
God ; it is what Josiah Royce called treason, proving 
traitor to even a larger reality than his " beloved 
community." If men do not morally " take to " 
Christ, then they do not ** take to '* the fundamental 
law of the universe, not as an arbitrary ruler has 
constructed it, but as the moral sense demands it. 
Murdering and stealing and lying are not the 
heinous sins of the moral life; they are not the 
offenses on which Christ laid his finger. Their 
heinousness grows out of the fact that they reveal 
an utterly wrong attitude toward the fundamental 
laws of the universe. It is selfishness, unbrother- 
liness, lack of care for God and one's fellows, 
usurpation of the best things for one's self rather 
than devotion of one's best self to God and man — 
it is this that concerned Christ and that lies at the 
root of all the offenses that we call sin. Yet no- 
where is this very quality more condemned than in 
the character of Christ, and if a man does not believe 
in him, then he does not believe in God or his 
fellows or the universe, and he is a castaway in 
the nature of the case. And central in the whole 
scene is the spirit of sacrifice which is the secret 
of the cross. Attitude toward that will decide the 
salvation of any man. He takes God on those 
terms or he does not take him at all. 

Now that is difficult to realize in the regular 
placid ongoing of human affairs, but it is impossible 
to miss when the upheavals come that test the soul. 
When the test does come and men find themselves 
throwing life away for an invisible cause, or sharing 



44 T'he Christian Faith and the New Day 

the strain and need of their social group at their 
own cost, then the meaning of the cross of Christ 
grows clear, grows clear as the natural expression 
of the law of a universe of a moral God, and it 
is no wonder that other men looking on feel that 
when the sacrifice becomes complete those who face 
it face also the supreme and saving instance of it 
and yield themselves to it. A God who can inspire 
men to heroism that casts life and all else aside may 
surely be expected to reveal himself to them with 
unmistakable clearness for their allegiance. H^ 
saves them by his own sacrifice, not by theirs, but 
it is their sacrifice that makes his grow real to 
them. It is like the revelation of the meaning of 
God's fatherhood that comes to a man when he 
finds himself a father. He may have heard of it 
all his life, may have believed it, may have preached 
it, but he knows it best when something in his own 
life feebly, haltingly, but really matches it. It is 
not having an earthly father that makes us know 
our heavenly Father best; it is being an earthly 
father that makes it clearest. It is accepting the 
principle of sacrifice for one's self that makes the 
saving sacrifice of Christ definite and meaningful. 
The whole area of the saving of Christ will thus 
be immensely widened. We are not to speak in 
terms that imply occasional salvation and general 
loss. We shall not identify the evidence for sal- 
vation with certain formalities or alliances. We 
shall look for those evidences quite as truly in the 
spirit with which men face the needs of their 
fellows and the sacrifices they are ready to make in 
the interest of their fellows. Self-protection, self- 



The Christian Theology of Salvation 45 

defense, self-seeking will never let one into the 
secret of the way of life; they lead the other way. 
But self-sacrifice, self-forgetfulness, self-giving, lead 
toward Calvary and men who take that path find 
life because God has opened a fountain of life at 
Calvary. It is his grace that inspires sacrifice; it 
is he who has made it the law of the advancing life, 
it is he who saves when men have yielded them- 
selves to that law. It is all of grace, but it is not 
abnormal, for the universe is built on the principles 
of a gracious God. 



IV 

THE CHURCH 

Regarding the Church, recent years have devel- 
oped three main groups of thinkers. One group 
have lost all hope for it; they count it moribund, 
out of date, useless. They would be willing to 
have it die, if they did not count it already dead. 
Christianity is handicapped by it and could well 
dispense with it. The hopelessness ranges all the 
way from the feeling that a spiritual force like 
Christianity ought not to have any organization 
at all to the saddened recognition that a once 
desirable institution has failed to adapt itself to 
new conditions so long that it is finally incrustated 
and cannot change. In books on reconstruction, it 
is not common to find any reference to the part 
that the church may have in it. Many of the 
writers have ceased to reckon it in as a factor; 
it is good enough for people who like it or have 
any sense of need for it, but *^ its purposes are 
ornamental and sentimental." With some of this 
group the thought confirms the hope. They have 
not cared for the church in any case. Always they 
have looked at it from the outside. With others, 
the decision has come after years of effort to get 
certain things accomplished in the churches when 
they have run constantly against immovable obstacles 
which have left them bruised and broken and have 

46 



The Church 47 

not allowed progress. These are regretful but con- 
vinced. It is quite needless to talk to them about 
the theology of the church. Indeed, with most of 
this group it is needless to talk about the theology 
of anything! 

Another group think the church is yet to become 
Christian for one reason or another. It is the hope 
of the future and if it will open out to the new 
day its life will continue.. Some of these observers 
are not sanguine about the readiness of the present 
leadership of the church to make the necessary 
changes, but they expect the changes, for all that. 
Others see signs of better times ahead, when the 
church will rise to meet the new day. They count 
it an essential institution, rooted in the nature of 
Christianity, and they are not inclined to discount 
its history, though they do declare the recent cata- 
clysm to be a revelation of its present inadequacy 
as a force among men. Part of the group expect 
it to open out to the new day at the point of 
broader interpretation of Christianity; part at the 
point of more efficient organization. Reconstruc- 
tion in the theology of the church is to them an 
entirely familiar conception. 

The third group are not willing even to discuss 
anything adverse to the church. What are called 
its faults are not faults of the church at all, but 
only misinterpretations of its real life on the part 
of the individual. ** There need be no fear for 
the church. God will take care of it; it is Christ's 
body and He will not desert it." Many who speak 
in these terms are thinking of the spiritual fact 
rather than an organization, but others mean what- 



48 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

ever the church actually appears to them to be. It 
is next door to blasphemy to speak of the destruction 
or death or disappearance of the church. A divine 
institution is not subject to the changes of human 
periods, and the gates of hell have sought to prevail 
against the church ever since its founding, so that 
there is nothing new or startling about present con- 
ditions. Obviously for this group any talk of recon- 
structing the theology of the church is nonsense or 
worse. 

Plainly, there is room for a fourth group to 
form — those who believe in and love the church 
and just because of their love feel that the church 
must both live in and guide the life of the day, not 
of this day but of every day. In one true sense all 
days are essentially alike and so there is a funda- 
mental continuity in the church. In another sense, 
this is a new day and another may yet come which 
will be new to this one then old. So there must 
be new adaptation of the machinery and mentality 
of the church. This group was vigorous before 
the war and is even stronger in view of the 
experiences of the war. The readiness of church 
forces to meet one striking emergency encourages 
them to believe that it will meet the more prosaic 
but more abiding emergency which the new times 
present. For them, the theology of the church will 
bear reconstructing in the light of the new demands 
of the task of the church. 

Oddly enough, though the church is the most 
obvious of the three facts we are considering, it is 
most difficult to say just what is the path to its 
place in a reconstructed theology. That it must 



The Church 49 

share in the democratic movement in practice is 
clear enough, not that it may go on living, but that 
it may render the service to which it is called. But 
it is not so clear what theological changes are nec- 
essary to bring it to its right position. Three 
fairly simple elements must enter into it, elements 
not new to thoughtful leaders. 

First, the theory of the church must be put in 
terms of vitality rather than of institution. It is 
an organism, which has an organization. Its outer 
form must not be allowed to determine or limit its 
inner life. Thomas Chalmers, v/ithdrawing from 
the Established Church of Scotland, said to the royal 
commissioners : " I have no veneration for the 
Church of Scotland qua an establishment, but I have 
the utmost veneration for it qua an instrument of 
Christian good.'' Men cannot fail of a certain 
amount of veneration for the institution with which 
their religious lives are associated, but there are 
some who identify the channel with the grace that 
came. Only that identification could justify the 
recent protest of Bishop Gore against any unity with 
non-conforming churches ** except on the ground of 
repentance, reconciliation and absorption," with re- 
fusal of pulpit exchange and withholding of the 
Lord's Supper from the non-confirmed unless they 
are in danger of death and express a desire for 
reconciliation with the church! The honesty and 
frankness of the protest are admirable, but the 
revelation of a type of theology is obvious. It is 
only more explicit than the view of the church 
which prevails elsewhere. For it identifies the 
church with its organization, and that is nothing 



^O The Christian Faith and the New Day 

unusual. In every church are those who think that 
without this or that there can be no church, and 
most of them rest the thought either on history or 
on Scripture teaching. 

As for Scripture, it gives one pause to discover 
all of his brethren rejoicing in the evidence for 
their own particular type of organization in the 
New Testament, whereas he wonders that they do 
not see how his own particular type is required. 
There grows upon him the feeling that the New 
Testament is not a handbook of church government 
but a seed-plot out of which any kind of govern- 
ment can grow that the inner life may need. And 
as for the history, that is a matter of valuation and 
depends on what one likes in church strength. 
What one man counts the secret of power another 
may count the weakness of the church at any given 
time. Pride in one's ancestral line is modified by 
unmistakable failures of that line to function as a 
church ought to do. 

PauFs figure of the church as the body of Christ 
is capable of a deadening or a vitalizing interpre- 
tation. We can think of the church as having to 
have this or that kind of organization, certain kinds 
of officers, a certain kind of sacramental observance, 
certain orders of worship, and so on because the 
" body " we are accustomed to has them. '^ Bodies 
cannot be thrown together higgledy-piggledy,'' says 
one advocate of institutional uniformity. A real 
Christian church must be orderly, and any thought 
of church unity must wait on the appearance of 
" bodies " which are rightly formed. We are 
warned that "we have no way of shaking hands 



The Church 5 1 

with other men if they have no hands ; " which is 
true but not particularly important unless it is 
proved that we cannot have communication with 
other men in any way but by shaking hands. On 
the contrary, we may interpret PauFs figure vitally 
— the church being a body informed by the life of 
Christ and taking such outward form as will best 
express that life. That it will have an outer form 
is clear, and it is wholly possible that certain forms 
or one special form may prove best under given cir- 
cumstances or at a given time. But the outer form 
is for the purposes of its inner life and not for its 
restriction. To insist that the life shall not be rec- 
ognized under any other than our favorite form and 
then to find defenses for our view in verses of Scrip- 
ture is to cramp the life of the church and to endan- 
ger its unity. 

All the influences of recent years are with the in- 
sistence that methods of government in civil affairs 
are measured by the service they render the people 
whom they govern, rather than by the officers they 
have. Democracy does not need Presidents or Gov- 
ernors. Autocracy does not need Kaisers or Czars. 
Either can frame for itself forms of government of 
many sorts. And the vital thing has proved to be 
the life that expresses itself in the forms. In such a 
day we cannot go on pretending that the church of 
Christ can be identified with any one form of or- 
ganization. As the movements for church unity 
gain in momentum, we shall observe that element 
of reconstruction all the more. 

Secondly, the theory of the church in its relation 
to man must rest increasingly on its outgoing rather 



52 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

than its incoming life. Essentially the church is not 
an inviting body, calling people to come to it; but 
an offering body, giving something to the world in 
the name of Christ its head. It must lose itself in 
the needs of others. Keeping itself alive is the last 
concern of any vital church, w^hen it is proposed as 
an end in itself. Christ has given it a simple meth- 
od of self-preservation : it saves its life by losing it ; 
it keeps its truth by sharing it; v^hen it forgets it- 
self, God remembers it. Any theory of the church 
which magnifies its importance in other terms than 
those of service is astray in these days. Its outgo- 
ing current is in two lines — in the truth it has to 
teach and in the life it has to share. 

a. As to the truth — the church is a teaching 
body; it has something it wants the world to know, 
not something the world may take or leave as it 
pleases, but something the church is passionately de- 
termined it shall learn and live by. Its Master 
once declared that he had come to bear witness to 
the truth; so has the church come. That decides 
its methods of teaching and the contents of its creed. 
It has no right to hold anything important which 
it is not eager to teach and which it does not believe 
would change the world if it could only get it 
learned. It must set up no theory of proper meth- 
ods of teaching which do not rest on a conviction of 
the swiftest and surest ways of getting the business 
done. The sharp contrast between the normal re- 
sponse of men overseas to religious messages and 
the response of men on this side under our accus- 
tomed ways of presenting the truth is causing many 
men of experience to ask serious questions. No one 



The Church 53 

expects the church to use in normal times and con- 
ditions the methods which proved effective in ab- 
normal times, but many thoughtful men are insist- 
ing that the same results get accomplished somehow. 
We may look for a large increase of unusual ways 
of putting the truth to men, and our one concern is 
to be whether it is the real truth and whether it 
really gets taught. Here is a letter from the 
former minister of a large and influential city 
church, written after his return from successful 
service in Europe with soldiers: 

" I look back upon my year in France and Germany 
with the utmost satisfaction. I truly believe it has been 
the best year of my life. I think most of us who were 
over there feel that way. In the Pauline sense, there 
was a mental and spiritual intoxication we enjoyed. It 
is going to be difficult to live the sober life of conventional 
and respectable parish work. The question that has been 
occupying my mind this summer is whether or not I shall 
go back to parish work. ... I do not think I could go 

back to church or any other to engage in the usual 

before-the-war activities. . . . What has been absorbing 
my mind is how we are going to get at that great multi- 
tude of young men, who throwing off their khaki have 
melted back into civil life. You know how they came 
to us over there. You know how they listened to us. 
Many of them, doubtless, had been church-goers. Most 
of them had not; at least that is my opinion. Will they 
be coming back into our churches? Reports thus far are 
not encouraging. . . . There is a great chasm between 
the ordered worship of a church and the experience of the 
average man who has not been accustomed to its serv- 
ice. Its dignity, which you and I love, to him is dull. 
Its whole program, including the sermon, is not in- 
teresting. And yet we have learned that to many of 
these men, religion is not uninteresting and without 
power." 



54 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

There is no escaping the issue involved. Will the 
church find a way of getting its message heard, or 
w^ill it be so devoted to accepted methods that it can 
blame the world for not hearing? Will it confuse 
a theory of work with the work itself? Will its 
teaching theory bend to its teaching need? When 
the late Dr. Benson was appointed to the See of 
Canterbury, Dr. Hort wrote him a note, not of con- 
gratulation but of warning, in which he said: ** The 
danger for the English church is its calm and unob- 
trusive alienation in thought and spirit from the 
great silent multitude of Englishmen." Sir Hiram 
Johnston has written just now that the reason why 
people stay away from the church in England is 
that ** much of the traditions, teachings and pre- 
cepts of the Christian churches are actually out 
of date." Most Americans pride themselves on a 
nearer relation between churches and the mass of 
people than in England, but it is nothing to boast 
of even if it exists, for it is a difference of distance 
rather than of nearness. And men under the spell 
of the memorable acceptance of the message they had 
to deliver during the war have come to wonder 
whether our ordinary way of declaring these truths 
has any connection with the lives of the men they 
are meant to help. But that is hardly a theological 
question. 

Yet of course it opens the whole question of what 
the church feels itself set to teach. And that is the 
old question of creeds. We have been through a 
hard term of school as Christian believers in the past 
five to twenty-five years. Our lessons have been 
long and we have been held to our tasks at cost of 



The Church 55 

blood and brain. Were we meant to learn any- 
thing new or were we meant only to be confirmed 
in what we already knew and were neglecting? 
Our creeds are what we tell the world about our 
faith ; they are what we want the world to believe. 
Agreeing that what we have told in them is true 
and good, do we also agree that it is told as we now 
see it and as it will be best seen by the world we 
are here to serve? Sin, selfishness, ambition have 
always been bad ; but never before have they led to 
such a world condition as we have experienced. 
Have we then no new word to say about sin ? Vica- 
rious suffering has always been a spiritual reality, 
marvelous in our eyes, but never before has it 
seemed so great a reality nor so surely an issue from 
the heart of the universe; is there nothing more to 
say about it than we say in our creeds? The om- 
nipotence of God — do we believe less or more about 
it? Would the world know — just mentally know, 
not spiritually — would the world know what we 
mean by what we say about the omnipotence of 
God? Can we put our creeds in the hands of men 
of the present day and trust them to make out our 
case for the Christian religion? It is quite certain 
that in general we cannot. 

Every church has to test itself as it faces the 
world by such questions as these, in this new day. 
Churches that profess no written creed have the 
same necessity upon them to analyze anew those 
tacit credal articles which are often more rigorous 
than spoken ones, but it is much clearer in the case 
of churches whose formulas are set down in public 
declarations. Two questions are inevitable: Do 



56 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

they hold their creeds with the passion due to such 
days as these? Do they find in their creeds the 
truths they want to tell the world as they want to 
tell them? Instant answers come from two groups 
within these churches. One group reply that what 
IS needed is to bring the church back to the un- 
changed creed, refusing to admit the need or right 
of changes. Its members cannot escape the uneasy 
feeling that talk of alteration to meet a current need 
is only half-disguised surrender of vital realities. 
They feel strongly that the church has lost its pas- 
sion for the creed, and they say, ^* So much the 
worse for the church ! '* They want the army 
brought up to the Colors; they call for a revival of 
the church rather than a revision of the creed. It 
is the answer always to be expected when altera- 
tions in accepted positions are suggested, and it is 
rooted in a theological conviction — that the church 
is a depository of truth rather than an agency for 
the service of its day. 

In all credal churches there appears another 
group who hear any talk of creeds with impatience. 
^* They are dead; why not let them stay dead?" 
A member of this group writes that there was never 
such a good time to forget the existence of creeds 
as now when even body is restive under authority or 
regulation. To propose attention to their contents 
now is only to divert the church from its late-dis- 
covered task of world-ministry. Which also ex- 
presses a theological conviction of the essential na- 
ture of the church as an agency of service rather 
than a teacher of truth. And the special difficulty 
of this latter position is that there is not a credal 



The Church 57 

church where the issue is not a vital one with scores 
of honest young men every year. The creeds ac- 
tually are not dead ; they are very much alive when 
these young men solemnly face them as the declared 
faith of their lives. If they find that the creeds rep- 
resent a point of view or contain teachings which 
they cannot preach, they must either accept the ex- 
planations which a sympathetic instructor or pastor 
gives, or accept the stern charge of other men to 
stay out of the ministry unless they can accept the 
creeds literally. If they find that the creeds omit 
something which they consider essential to the full 
message they are sent to deliver, they must immedi- 
ately surpass their creeds at the very point where 
they are apt to feel most convinced of their mes- 
sage. No one can come close to young men in 
training for the ministry of any credal church to- 
day, nor indeed to the young men of any church, 
without finding that the discussion of the creeds is 
no academic matter. 

The question may be fairly stated if it is directly 
applied to a familiar instance, the one most directly 
under the eye of the writer. It is not of universal 
importance in itself, but it may be held as typical. 
Probably the Presbyterian churches have held as 
heartily and loyally to their position as credal 
churches as any others and their Westminster Con- 
fession of Faith is available and well known to all 
churchmen. Attitudes toward it vary from literal 
devotion to sharp dislike. A considerable group of 
ministers and others speak of it as document laid on 
the shelf and negligible. Others speak with re- 
newed amazement of its excellencies. Every year 



^8 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

scores of young men stand before their brethren and 
declare that they accept it *^ as containing the system 
of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures." If 
some of their older brethren have discarded it, these 
at least can hardly begin by discarding it while their 
ordination vows are fresh on their lips. In addi- 
tion, hundreds of elders and deacons in these 
churches declare every year their acceptance of it in 
the same terms. If there is to be a credal church 
at all, this is the way it must be. 

For more than seven years it has been my duty 
to survey this extended Confession carefully with 
keen-eyed, honest-hearted young men, who are not 
prepared to take vows lightly. Trifling with creeds 
is no habit with them, but they come to the docu- 
ment in the atmosphere of this day and not of an 
earlier one. And no one who has not made a fresh 
study of an historic creed in the full light of this 
year of grace is prepared for a helpful opinion about 
what ought to be done with it. Still, it is no judg- 
ment based on recent strident conditions but a con- 
viction born of many years of careful and admiring 
study of it that leads to the definite assurance that 
these churches everywhere should face anew the duty 
of revising, rewriting or replacing the Westminster 
Confession. Perhaps a statement of the grounds of 
that conviction will illustrate what is meant by the 
call for a reconstruction of the theory of the church 
as a teaching agency, for they apply to several other 
historic creeds held by present-day churches. There 
should be no pride of method in making the change. 
Carefully selected men might sit for five or more 



The Church ^9 

years in counsel over the matter, but the work 
should be undertaken as soon as possible. 

Five facts are borne in on one in studying the 
Westminster Confession of Faith as a document for 
this new day of divine leadership: first, the Con- 
fession is too long for the purpose of the church ; it 
goes into details for which the church can claim no 
passion and no deep-down assurance; it simply can- 
not insist that it yearns to have the world of un- 
saved men commit itself to all these thirty-five 
chapters. Secondly, the Confession is too academic 
and philosophical. The Christian faith has a phi- 
losophy, but it is not essentially a philosophy in it- 
self. The Confession is far more academic than the 
Bible and less vital. If any one thinks not, he has 
not lately read the Confession or else he has not 
lately read the Bible. Thirdly, the Confession is 
too polemic — not so polemic as many think, and 
not antagonistic. Its mood is not belligerent, but 
neither is it winsome. It is not aimed at the hearts 
of men ; it is not a call to the wandering world with 
the good news of a Father. Its purpose is not to 
commend the Christian faith but to state it without 
reference to whether men care to accept it or not. 
But the church cares mightily and it ought to show 
it. Fourthly, the Confession is too old in some of 
its phraseology and it is naturally lacking in terms 
which the advance of Christian thought has made 
wholly familiar to believers and to the world. That 
defect could be made good with some ease as to 
particular words and phrases, but the tone of the 
two new chapters differs widely from that of the 



6o The Christian Faith and the New Day 

older ones and illustrates what I am arguing just 
now. Fifthly, the Confession is partial to certain 
phases of truth and either minimizes or overlooks 
certain other phases which have immense meaning 
for life to-day. The fact that it seemed necessary 
recently (1903) to add two chapters to the Confes- 
sion and on such subjects as Missions and the Holy 
Spirit is startling in its implication. How could 
two such subjects be omitted or slighted in such a 
Confession ? But if we look for that universal love 
of God and the program of his Kingdom of which 
we have been speaking, we shall miss them also. 
The Confession does '* contain the system of doc- 
trine taught in the Holy Scriptures,'' but its accent 
and emphasis are not wholly those of the Scriptures 
and its system is finer than some of its parts in any 
case. 

The mere illustration may pass without interest 
to many who are of other denominations with or 
without formal creeds, but the point of it cannot be 
unimportant to any Christian believers and specially 
to Christian teachers. That point is that a sound 
theory of church teaching requires it to be such as 
makes for passion and earnestness, that it is to be 
vital and not merely academic, that it is not to be 
polemic but winsome, that it is to be kept fresh in 
the tones of the day, and that it is to set out the full 
orb of truth as it has come to be seen in the day in 
which the church is living. With some men this 
is all matter of course ; with others each item is open 
to contest. At the root of it the difference is theo- 
logical — in the field of ecclesiology, to be technical. 

The main ground of concern is not primarily for 



The Church 6 1 

the church itself. It is for the world to which the 
church must bear its message from God. That 
world IS more open to truth to-day than ever be- 
fore. The church must be more eager with its mes- 
sage, its whole message and nothing but its message. 
If it cannot put passion and enthusiasm into its task 
it must in all decency give way to some agency that 
can meet the splendid new opportunity. Any part 
of our theory that conflicts with so obvious a fact 
needs reconstructing. 

b. The outgo of the church is not in truth alone 
but in the life which it has to share. Christ has 
called men to come to Him; He has never commis- 
sioned the church to call men to come to it. His 
order to the church instead is to go to the world, 
bearing His life to the world. The static, limited 
theory of the church has always stood in the way of 
that. 

For a long time the extensive outgoing of the 
church has justified itself. The missionary battle 
has been won and no respectable theory of the church 
to-day could omit its obligation to carry the gospel 
to every creature. But the intensive outgoing of the 
church is not yet accepted in some quarters. The 
arguments against it to-day are precisely the ones 
that were formerly used in opposing the missionary 
program. Texts of Scripture were quoted against 
missions, though now no one doubts the drift of 
Scripture in its behalf. The understood program 
of the Kingdom of Christ was against it, though no 
one now doubts that that program is for it. The 
hopelessness of the task was urged, though now it 
looks feasible. The very will of God was used 



62 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

against it ; he did not mean that it should be done, 
because he had other uses for the heathen than to 
have them learn the gospel. And these are the very 
things urged against aggressive and intensive social 
service on the part of the church. Texts are quoted 
against it, regardless of the drift of Scripture; the 
program of the Kingdom of Christ is used against 
it; the hopelessness of the task is urged and the in- 
crease of social evils is all but gloried in as evidence 
of that ; the will of God is used here also — he has 
given over the vrorld to its arch-enemy and it is no 
longer the object of his love and redeeming purpose 
except in the destruction of most that now is. The 
theory of the church which this implies is clear 
enough. It is not a church of outgo, not a body 
with a redeeming message to society. Its gospel 
has power only for redemption of individuals, or if 
it has further power the church is not to use it. Its 
message is only to individuals whom it may hope 
to redeem from society. The concern of the church 
for social evils is not part of its gospel except as it 
gives redeemed individuals a better chance in the 
world. As for making a transformed human order, 
that is not part of the program committed to it. 

So we find the familiar distinction between hu- 
manitarian work and religious or Christian work. 
It gives point to a familiar story in which a welfare 
organization lays before a Young Women's Chris- 
tian Association secretary a proposal for help for an 
industrial group, and is told, '' You seem to forget 
that this is a Christian association, not a moral 
one!'' 

But in recent years some thousands of Christian 



The Church 63 

men have found themselves serving the needs of 
their fellows in very material ways, with sacrifice 
and devotion. The question is whether they should 
have been doing it in the name of the church or not. 
Was it because they were Christians? Did they 
have an obligation as followers of Christ to do this 
sort of thing, or was it some side issue of their lives ? 
Was the church back of them when they ran a 
Y. M. C. A. canteen or only when they conducted a 
religious service? Were they churchmen when 
they fought the evils of a camp or a billet, or only 
when they called men to Christ? Here is a Chau- 
tauqua lecturer telling what he has seen in sixty- 
nine small cities where he has spoken, remarking 
that churches generally have occupied themselves 
with denouncing evils but have done little or noth- 
ing constructive. " Ordinarily in these towns there 
is not one single person or influence interested 
in directing the recreational life of the people in a 
definite, constructive fashion." Well, what of it, 
so far as the church is concerned ? Is that any spe- 
cial business of the church? Some say not. They 
want nothing in their pulpits but the " pure " or 
the "' simple " gospel, and unless their people are 
winning individual souls they are not conceived to 
be doing church work at all. A minister writes to 
his church paper to say that he thanks God he did 
not mention the war in his pulpit, but gave himself 
to preaching the gospel, and he does not propose to 
be diverted now into any talk of a league of nations. 
In one large religious gathering a speaker declined 
to approve a church movement because it recognized 
the Y. M. C. A. which had " lost its religious ac- 



64 ^^^ Christian Faith and the New Day 

cent '* and was giving itself to humanitarian work. 
In an address opposing a movement for church co- 
operation because it declared itself prepared to speak 
for the church on matters of international morals, 
civic reform, industrial disputes, and the like, a 
noted religious leader and head of an institution for 
training Christian workers declared that these are 
all commendable things and every intelligent citizen 
ought to do all he can to forward them, but to bring 
the church into such work is " for the Bride of 
Christ to become a harlot! " Now, quite apart 
from the insult that offers to Christian men who 
hold a different view, it is endurable as an unmis- 
takable expression of a certain view of the church 
as an agent of life. On that theory the Christian 
must steadily surpass his church in human interest 
and human service. Errands for humanity that 
challenge his deepest devotion and strain his ener- 
gies at their best need expect no cooperation from 
the institution which is or represents the body of 
that Christ whom he is trying to serve before his 
fellows! It must be narrow; he is to be broad. It 
is to confine itself to one line of effort ; he must exert 
himself in many lines. 

It is a curious situation. Many of those who 
hold this restricted view of the church's duty as an 
agency of life are far better than their theory calls 
them to be. They are doing actively and earnestly 
exactly what they think it is no business of the 
church to attempt. They are concerned for the 
welfare of women and children, eager for legislation 
and reform in labor and housing, working for purer 
city life. Indeed, these facts are constantly used to 



The Church 65 

argue that their theory of the church of Christ and 
of his program does not prevent large activity in 
this wider field. But as a matter of fact their 
theory would prevent it if they lived by it, while 
the Spirit of God in them is stronger and finer than 
the theory they hold for the church. If it is the 
sole duty of the church to win individuals out of 
the wreck, then in all fairness the men of the church 
ought not to be diverting their energies from that 
woefully needed business to these works of welfare 
that take time and money and strength. Whatever 
returns such efforts yield, they are not large in 
this particular field of the rescue of individuals from 
the social wreck which according to the theory must 
continue until it becomes absolute. Those occa- 
sional churches which draw off their members from 
all worldly activities and center everything on the 
winning of lost men, leaving the dead to bury their 
dead or to cleanse their own hopeless evils, are logi- 
cal if that is the sole business of the church in this 
dispensation. 

And yet, here is the British Labor Party with a 
document that rises to great heights as a statement 
of essentially Christian ideas ; here are Rotary Clubs 
and Chambers of Commerce announcing programs 
that sound like little sections from a Sermon on 
the Mount — is that the churches business? If we 
say that the church inspired these movements, then 
Was the church about its real business in doing so? 
For this new day that issue is bound to be joined. 
That is part of the gospel of Christ or it is not. If 
it is, then it is part of the church's business; if it is 
not, then there are larger hopr^s for the race that 



66 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

now IS in other agencies than the church of the 
saving Christ. It is not a matter of texts of Scrip- 
ture, but of the Scripture itself. It is not a matter 
of quotations from this or that authority, but of a 
place in the human order for one like unto the Son 
of Man. Dean Milman was right when he said of 
The Imitation of Christ that it was glaringly mis- 
named because *^ that which distinguishes Christ*s 
religion — the love of man — is entirely and abso- 
lutely left out." Business men who take their re- 
sponsibility for their employees seriously, labor lead- 
ers who share with their fellows hardships which 
they could avoid, social reformers who give them- 
selves to the correction of evils and abuses, are not 
to feel that they are better than their creed or are 
going beyond the gospel that saves them. They are 
to feel that they are on the errand of the church of 
Christ as truly as they are when they plead with 
men to accept the Christ who is their Master and 
Lord. And if the church believes that the ultimate 
hope for all solutions of human problems lies in 
Christ, then it must formulate a theory of its exist- 
ence that includes the attempt to solve such prob- 
lems in him. Theology must provide for such a 
church as this — a church measured by its outgo 
rather than its income. 

Thirdly, the theory of the church needs to be 
stated in terms of unity instead of division. That 
means that we are to think in wholes and not in 
parts. If we still have fragments, built around 
differing ideas, as we may well do, then we are to 
consider them fragments and not wholes from which 



^he Church 



67 



the other fragments have unfortunately separated 
themselves. And we must leave behind the calm 
assumption that the real trouble is that all the frag- 
ments are not reduced to the form and shape of the 
particular fragment which is dear to ourselves. 
Heretofore these parts, which we call churches, have 
held one of four relations to each other: they have 
been antagonistic, or indifferent, or in fellowship, 
or in federation. This last is as far as a great 
many are ready to go, lest they may sacrifice some 
theory of the church. These are the four relation- 
ships that exist in the villages and cities of America 
to-day. It is largely on the foreign mission field 
that the further step of union has seemed possible. 
A theological instructor in China tells of a meeting 
there when a Chinese minister arose and said, point- 
ing to different missionaries : " You are an Ameri- 
can Presbyterian, and you cannot help it, for you 
were brought up that way. You are a Canadian 
Methodist, and you cannot help it, for the same 
reason. You are an English Churchman, and you 
cannot help it, for you also were brought up that 
way. But we are Chinese Christians, and we do 
not propose to permit you men from abroad to keep 
us apart." There is large evidence of the fact that 
it is the hindering hand of Christendom that pre^ 
vents Christian believers in mission lands from 
forming many unions. It is not hard to find ex- 
cuses for it, and if one is hard pressed one can al- 
ways fall back on solemn responsibility as a guard- 
ian of the truth, but the net result is the same — the 
divisions of a by-gone day are being forced on new 



68 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

situations where they might be avoided. Churches 
there are being led into the same four relationships 
that mark them here. 

But all these relations rest on a theology of the 
church. It is because the church is conceived in one 
set of terms instead of another that it opposes other 
churches or lets them alone or fraternizes with them 
or federates with them. And the day when the 
church has a theory of itself that permits unity with 
other fragments of its one life, it will be able to 
unite. If it has pet notions which cannot be sur- 
rendered, then the case is closed. It is only in 
part what we call a practical question ; at root it is 
a theological one. If the church really is one, and 
its multiplicity is in unity, then it will not be diffi- 
cult to find the path to union. 

The peculiar condition in the new day that chal- 
lenges the church at this point is a paradox familiar 
to any observer ; that the world in which the church 
must live and work to-day is one world and at the 
same time persistently refuses to become one. The 
economic and political interdependence, the inter- 
twining of peoples, the movements toward unity of 
nations and groups, are all phenomena of a recent 
day. They make the essential unity of the world 
obvious. They warrant programs that presume 
upon unity. But no sooner does the program ap- 
pear than suspicion of the unity develops and oppo- 
sitions arise from various quarters. The trouble is 
not with the fact of unity; it is with the spirit of 
unity. The world is one, but it does not deeply 
care to be one. Yet its greatest hope for the future 
is in realizing and rejoicing in its unity. 



The Church 69 

The same paradox appears when one turns to 
the apparently complex problems of modern life 
with which the church has to deal. They are the 
result of the pressure of essential unity of human in- 
terests which men are not willing to admit; they 
exist because men are one and not willing to be one. 
There is nothing serious on the horizon in the form 
of a social problem which is not simply and solely 
a problem of spirit. Men are so truly one that if 
they do not feel right toward each other, social fric- 
tion is bound to come, yet it is just the refusal of 
men to recognize their oneness with those who seem 
different from them that makes the trouble. Jesus 
gathered it all up in the single duty of loving one's 
neighbor as one's self, based on an earlier love of the 
one God. There are not many things to do to start 
us toward the solution of our problems ; there is one 
thing to do. It all roots back in a matter of spirit. 
And when the very institution, the one institution, 
that can be supposed to know that secret and to rep- 
resent it and propagate it, is split into scores of 
fragments which either lack or resent the idea of 
unity, what hope is there for the world ? How can 
a divided church, reluctant to meet on wholly com- 
mon grounds, skeptical within itself over differences 
of teaching and accent, how can a divided church 
hope to heal divisions between races or between eco- 
nomic and social groups? What can it say that 
will not choke it? No one suggests dead uniform- 
ity. Men are not built that way, nor social orders. 
But unity, deep-down oneness, fellowship that is not 
patronizing but natural — one can suggest nothing 
less in this demanding day. 



yo The Christian Faith and the New Day 

It will be simply impossible for the church to bear 
Its testimony to the world and accomplish the task 
committed to it if it refuses to take this further step 
and to let the world know that it counts itself one 
body in Christ. In a great emergency it revealed a 
unity that surprised itself. But no sooner is the 
emergency apparently off than the old voices begin 
to sound caution and some new ones join in the 
note. The snag the movement for union runs 
against is the theory of the church itself. Theology 
has made those theories ; it must now make new ones 
for the new day. 



V 

A CONCLUDING WORD 

The theology of God, of salvation, of the church 
— no one would pretend that these are the only 
points at which a measure of reconstruction may oc- 
cur, but they are typical, at least. They suggest 
movements toward democratizing the Christian 
faith, not because it is the fad of the hour, but be- 
cause it is of the essence of that faith. Autocracy, 
arbitrariness, irresponsible action, has no place in 
Christian theology, either regarding God or the way 
of salvation or the life of the church. They sug- 
gest also the bringing of our theology more con- 
stantly to the test of experience. It is what men 
have found God to be when they have trusted him 
that matters. It is the salvation that is actually 
saving men that counts. It is the church that does 
the business which the church is set to do that both 
God and men are apt to care for. They suggest 
further that theology must become an actual work- 
ing basis for the ongoing of the Kingdom of God 
among men. It is a working God with whom we 
have to do, not quiescent, not programless for the 
human race, not resting in eternity with an arbi- 
trary purpose which is getting itself worked out 
whether or no, but one whose hand is on the world 
he has made and loves and who calls those who be- 
lieve in him to find and use that program for the 

71 



72 The Christian Faith and the New Day 

coming day. It is a salvation that fits a man for 
the life that is now no less than for the world to 
come that concerns theology, and it cannot there- 
fore be cataclysmic, but must be vital, changing the 
man into a world-citizen as well as shaping him for 
his eternal destiny. It is a church that faces a 
future with such fellowship among its parts as holds 
them to the one task of a victorious gospel that must 
be found by theology and that church must be an 
organism which grows as it may need to express for 
each new day the old, assured life of its one Head. 

In a recent article President Faunce has brought 
together two famous expressions whose contrast is 
suggestive for these days, both for young men who 
are facing the ministry and for older men who are 
now in the midst of church leadership. One is the 
couplet from Hamlet : 

"The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, 
That ever I was born to set it right! " 

That feeling has kept some men from entering the 
ministry and has made other men turn willingly 
from the task to other callings. The problems just 
now are so great, the difficulties are so many; the 
time is so out of joint and the task of setting it right 
so confused. Let such men seek the easier and 
simpler way of living. But in our own day there 
was another poet, Rupert Brooke, and his exclama- 
tion is: 

" Now God be thanked who has matched us with this 
hour!'' 

Only men who are glad to be matched with an 



A Concluding Word 73 

awesome hour have any place in the ministry to- 
day. In the rough days of Israel, a leader with 
too few men already found that the one thing he 
must have among his followers was courage, and 
he risked his small force by ordering all who were 
fearful or timid to return to their homes. There 
were many of them, and their going left only a 
handful, but these knew no fear. They took the 
risks of a dangerous campaign with a kind of hu- 
morous glee and by their daring they set the fearful 
free as well as themselves. There is no Gideon to 
challenge us to courage, but there is a greater Leader 
whose cause has its great opportunity now, and the 
call to courage is clear in the stirring events of these 
days. A psychologist has been discussing recently 
what he calls the " religious thrill,'' about which he 
speculates profoundly. Something is wrong with a 
Christian leader who can face the world without 
that thrill to-day, and he will thrill with fear or 
with eagerness. If he cannot think of reconstruc- 
tion in the terms of his theology without a panic or 
resentment, then he cannot meet the demands of 
the living Spirit of God. He has confused life with 
form, truth with phrases. But if he is sure of his 
gospel, sure of his faith, sure of his Master, he will 
be glad to face a demanding day and fit himself 
to it. 

It was regarding the proposal of the League of 
Nations that our chief executive was speaking when 
he used terms that apply to the task of religion for 
the future : '^ The stage is set, the destiny disclosed. 
It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but 
by the hand of God who led into this way. We 



74 'I'he Christian Faith and the New Day 

cannot turn back, we can only go forward, with 
lifted eyes and freshened spirit to follow the vision. 
It was of this that we dreamed at our birth. Amer- 
ica shall in truth lead the way. The light streams 
upon the path ahead and nowhere else.^' It is upon 
that path where the light streams, where One 
greater than America leads the way, that we set our 
feet as we face the immediate future. 



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